The computer that I used for Vue died recently. So I bought a new computer. I installed all of my 3D modeling and rendering apps on the new computer except for Vue (because its license was only good for the old computer). Vue Infinite 9.5 was compatible with all the 3D tools I used, and I had an enormous Cornucopia 3D library of trees and plants and oceans and tons of other stuff. I had everything backed up, fortunately, because Cornucopia 3D is no more (I remember when it crashed back in the day).

Anyway... I'm looking for an outdoor rendering app that has terrains, lakes, plants, and skies. I loved Vue Infinite 9.5 because I used it for making planets. But it looks like I can use Blender to add planets to space scenes.

The outdoor rendering app needs to import my OBJ models for rendering as well, like streets, cars, (Poser) people, and buildings. Being able to greeble cityscapes would be great like I could do in Vue.

Thanks.

If you want to make many diverse kinds of scenes, plein air-type outdoor/landscape scenes, indoor scenes, cityscapes in close view, architecture, etc.  ... purchasing a current Vue subscription probably is your best, most economical bet. 

But if your primary interest is in landscapes (plein air), then you'll probably want Gaea (by Quadspinner). You can easily add plants to this, plus volumetric clouds and HDRI lighting. Plus, "lakes, plants and skies". The Gaea renderer is "reasonable" and there is an extremely active, wordlwide forum of users posting at every hour of the day. People do make some planetary images, but these are more rare for this software. But, most people I know who are into plein air scenes, couple Gaea with a modern, stand-alone rendering engine. Export the landscapes and water bodies out of Gaea and import them into some good rendering engine. Add trees and plants from almost any source, add people, buildings, load in a good unclipped HDRI fro Polyhaven, perhaps. Maybe some volumetric clouds from almost any source, and compose the scene in the rendering engine. "This Is The Way."  (or, at least, this is the way most of us do things now days.)

A vast array of incredibly detailed trees and plants is available on Artstation Marketplace, typically for about $2.00 USD per two trees (take a look at Moonik Office offerings for example), and you can get volumetric clouds there also.   Almost any modern stand-alone rendering engine will work - personally, I like Maverick Render. Almost any modern rendering engine supports "cloning" for plant duplication, and "scattering" - also for plant duplication.  And for "skies" and "planets" you want a rendering engine that supports volumetric objects. But most of the modern PBR engines do support volumetric files. And you'll want one that is good with HDRI lighting.

Alternatively, If you want to make cityscapes, basic architecture, interiors with active people, then you might want to try learning Unreal or Blender. The rendering engines in those apps improve all the time. But landscapes are not their forte. In fact, its a little difficult to get decent landscapes in those apps currently.

The current version of Vue is pretty good, but the reason it kind of fell out of favor is that it lagged way behind in adopting modern PBR materials, HDRI lighting, volumetric objects, and it is pretty insistent on keeping its own plant-building engine.  Meanwhile, Speedtree came along and took over the plant-making world for awhile, and then Autodesk Max and Maya added plant-making features and plant plug-ins. And some other plant-engines came into being. Plus, while this was happening, almost all the rendering engines developed cloning and scattering capabilities - kind of stealing the thunder from Vue.  Of course, "quadspinner" had broken away, got some good partners and started slowly developing Gaea, which is no doubt the very king of landscape generators. Produces far superior landscapes to anything in Vue and pretty much has killed off the other specialized terrain engines. But, Vue is now much more current in these things, so it has kind-of caught up.

So, I do this kind of work when I want to recreate, and I use Maverick Render as my main tool. I use Gaea, Speedtree and my primary model-building tool is Maya. If I don't make the plants myself, I get them from "Everyplant" (our old primary plant-maker from C3D days), or from Artstation Marketplace. Maverick Render is the center of things, but there are some things you need to know about it. First, it only works on Intel machines, and it only works with nVidia RTX video cards. It is entirely a GPU-based rendering engine. The reason I put up with these limitations, and that I built my current machine around it is because it is the most modern rendering engine on the planet. It has massive lighting facilities - excellent, excellent, excellent HDRI features at the core, topped by world-class studio lighting features. Plus, it directly incorporates Substance Designer archive files, which means you can adjust materials right within the rendering engine. And, it is damn fast. Maverick Render really is intended for professional product visualization, especially jewelry and cosmetics, but I have no great difficulty with landscapes.  The GPU-based rendering engines are indeed fast, but the more objects you have in a scene, the more they slow down. So, often for my landscapes, the rendering speed is basically the same as my older CPU-based rendering engines (Maxwell Render, for example).  What I'm trying to say is that consider the choice of rendering engine carefully.

So, any of these rendering engines that use cloning and scattering allow you to place multiple versions of plants all over your landscape, but cloning is hand placement, and scattering is kind of "procedural placement". Neither of these is "painting" as in Vue.  I think the trade-off is that we can use much more realistic plants in close-up and middle distance. But nothing is as easy as Vue's "painting" technology, which is why you still might prefer Vue, in the end.

So, something I might recommend is that you start by taking a good look at Gaea. I think you can get a free trial copy to play around with. Look at their instructional videos, and maybe sign up for the Discord forum to see what people are doing with it.  Even if you end up with a subscription to current Vue, you might want to have Gaea.

After that, you might have a decision point - current Vue, or pop for a good, modern rendering engine if you don't already have one.(At this point, I suppose I conclude that you will have to make a big path choice between the easier, simpler Vue or ... the more difficult..."The Way.")

I haven't mentioned Houdini here, although this is an option as well. Houdini has a good rendering engine currently is Houdini 2.0 is about to come out - which will be a big, major release. People do landscapes in Houdini, and trees, plants, and of course, water. Houdini has become a decent general-purpose model-builder as well. I hate being tied down in one single app (with the exception of Maya), so I don't favor this. But you might like it - its worth checking out.

I see that Vue Infinite 9.5 was released back in summer 2011. Vue has come a very long way since then (but can still read and load Poser files). I'd definitely install a trial of the latest Vue and see if it might be worth it. Otherwise you would have to junk a lot of skills, knowledge, and perhaps also Python scripts. Also, I believe the subscription gives you access to E-on's PlantFactory. I seem to remember that that they will also unlock your purchased Cornucopia stuff (though I may be wrong on that, or out of date).

No Windows 7 though. The target for Windows 7 would be Vue 2021.1 R6.1. I'm not sure they'd let you subscribe to that though.

Terragen is still around and had a lot of effort put into clouds a few years ago. But probably not as easy as the 'stylised but realistic' Vue atmospheric system and one-click presets.

Gaea has been mentioned above, and I think it had a major update recently too?

There's also various real-time software such as World Creator (or is it World Machine? I can never remember the difference), Instant Terra etc and after that you're into the real-time proper game-engines such as Unreal, Unity, some 2D/3D artists still us that old (Half Life?) engine whose name I can't recall (Source Engine?) and do nice things with it. I even see people still making pleasing planetscapes on DeviantArt with MojoWorld!

I used MojoWorld. I can't find the CD for it. I don't remember if it was a full or trial version or which mag it was from.But ya, I liked the style of MojoWorld renders.

Yes, MojoWorld is still fun to use for no-trees planetscapes and I believe the final 3.1.1. Pro can now be found at the Internet Archive. The problem is the rendering speed, as it was never able to take advantage of modern methods. I think there's a discussion thread on this, on the Renderosity MojoWorld Forum. An install of Poser 6 (can only be 6) is needed to get Poser .PZ3 files into a MojoWorld planetscape. It's sometimes amusing to see various technical papers from 3D academics today, when you realise that what they're trying to re-create is basically... MojoWorld. Such a pity it was never developed to have fast rendering.

But I'd still look at the latest Vue, if it can be run on your OS (I assume the new PC has Windows 11 on it), and if you can bear a subscription. Even a year would enable you to see if it's for you, or if you need to go to Terragen, Gaea or to a real-time engine.

Finally, I'd note that Poser 13 uses the latest Blender Cycles engine (re-branded in Poser as Superfly), so may be an easier option to use than spending years learning Blender just to use Cycles rendering. I guess DAZ Studio many even be an option these days, as it has a lot of (costly) outdoor scenes, terrains and vegetation available. But I guess that with either you'll lack a certain something in terms of Vue's lush atmospheres and vast distances.

Mind, you... there's also the rapidly developing AI and 360° VR, which might offer a sort of 'super MojoWorld' in due course - if not quite on the same 'planetary' scale. Around the corner is something called Skybox AI (currently in beta) which will soon... "generate complete 360° game environments from text prompts and/or sketches". The demo videos on YouTube suggest it will do (somewhat toony) space-art type 360° VR scenes with atmospheric depth-fogging...

Been using AI to do scenic and space landscapes that I can then use HDR-like for backgrounds when rendering my starships and whatnot.

Good to know that Poser 6 works with Mojoworld. Renders are super fast on my i9.

Shawn, for you, and for anyone else who might be interested in Gaea, here is an invite to the Gaea Discord Forum.  This link will expire 7 days from now.

https://discord.gg/DNKDm3te

The thing to look at first, probably is the "Artwork" thread.

So, ... what did you decide to do?

I'm waiting for Gaea 2.0 while playing with older terrain apps I haven't used.